Studies in Literature and the Arts (487-0-1)

Topic

Archive Poetics: Subaltern Knowledges & Irreverent

Instructors

Maria Alejandra Uslenghi
847/467-1713
3-113 Crowe

Meeting Info

Locy Hall 214: Tues 2:00PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

Archive Poetics: Subaltern Knowledges and Irreverent Uses

This seminar studies the contemporary appropriation, uses and reactivations of cultural archives in modern and contemporary Argentine literature and culture. We conceive the archive as a social machine that organizes and administers both texts and documents as well as our bodies through different forms of technology that registered our present. We explore the processes of memory that foreground the central role of archives, especially when it comes to the production of knowledge and experiences of subaltern communities, historically excluded. If archives have often been the basis for the rethinking of cultural heritages and foundational fictions, we pay particular attention to the new elaborations of historical, social and cultural models and uses deployed by 20th and 21st Argentine writers. Thus, we delve into art and literature engagements that erode the national archive's former boundaries, stability, function and meaning performing political intervention and subversions that prove to be increasingly recombinant and generative. At the core of our theoretical framework, we test Jorge Luis Borges' famous proposition that marginal cultures -minor literatures have legitimate access to a multiplicity of cultural traditions advocating an irreverent use of the universal archive as the source of true originality.

Class Materials (Required)

All course materials will be available on Canvas.